Pat Riley Basketball Quotations

If you have a positive attitude and constantly strive to give your best effort, eventually you will overcome your immediate problems and find you are ready for greater challenges.

Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.

There's always the motivation of wanting to win. Everybody has that. But a champion needs, in his attitude, a motivation above and beyond winning.

You have no choices about how you lose, but you do have a choice about how you come back and prepare to win again.

A champion needs a motivation above and beyond winning.

To have long term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some way.

There can only be one state of mind as you approach any profound test; total concentration, a spirit of togetherness, and strength.

People who create 20% of the results will begin believing they deserve 80% of the rewards.

Each Warrior wants to leave the mark of his will, his signature, on important acts he touches. This is not the voice of ego but of the human spirit, rising up and declaring that it has something to contribute to the solution of the hardest problems, no matter how vexing!

Giving yourself permission to lose guarantees a loss.

A particular shot or way of moving the ball can be a player's personal signature, but efficiency of performance is what wins the game for the team.

There's no such thing as coulda, shoulda, or woulda. If you shoulda and coulda, you woulda done it.

You have to defeat a great players aura more than his game.

He needs to dominate. We know it, he knows it. And it isn't a question of whether or not the ball is coming to him, he's got to go get it. It's getting to the point where it's got to be 10, 12, 14, 15 every night. When Shaq goes after the basketball then he's going to get those 15 rebounds.

He kept telling me he's ready. But I'm a stubborn old coach.

I thought we played some of the best basketball that we've played for two and a half quarters. Then we got really sloppy with turnovers. We lost the energy that we had but we closed it out.

We have been able to secure one of the most dominant men to ever play the game of basketball as a member of the Heat, ... At the same time, we have gained the flexibility to achieve our ultimate goal of winning an NBA championship.

There's a fine line here, and that fine line is that we are operating in a corporate world and pro basketball is part of that world,

This is an entirely different basketball team than I've ever coached. The personalities are different. There's a lot of great things. There's a lot of things that have to be purged. It's just a whole different view. There's a lot of good parts, so it's going to take some time to figure it all out.

Basketball is a business. Pure and simple. If you want to have fun, go to the YMCA.

Basketball is a game of conditioning and fatigue. That's why I believe in practicing a team to train when it's exhausted.

"Shouda, coulda, and woulda" won't get it done.

Whatever it takes to win.

There is no such thing as life in-between.

In all the research you do as a coach, studying other coaches and championship-type situations, you find that all those teams combined talent with great defense. You've got to stop other teams to win.

The Ten Commandments were not a suggestion.

If you get tough mentally, you can get tough physically and overcome fatigue.

Great players and great teams want to be driven. They want to be pushed to the edge. They don't want to be cheated. Ordinary players and average teams want it to be easy

Discipline is not a nasty word.

It's what you get from games you lose that is extremely important.

When you face a fork in the road, step on the exhilarator!

The true warrior understands and seizes that moment by giving an effort so intense and so intuitive that it could only be called one from the heart.

No rebounds - no rings.

Great effort springs naturally from great attitude.

Never be ready to play yesterday. Being ready to play today is what's important

There are only two options regarding commitment; you’re either in or you’re out.